Technology

A player of the popular online military simulator War Thunder has been banned from the game’s official forums after sharing a page from a restricted AV-8B Harrier flight manual. The incident marks at least the ninth known case in which classified or export-controlled material has been posted by users attempting to influence in-game accuracy.

In this latest case, a user uploaded a section from a NATOPS manual for the AV-8B and TAV-8B Harrier, used by the United States Navy and Marine Corps. The manual is marked “Distribution Statement C,” which means it is not approved for public release and is restricted to authorised U.S. government personnel and contractors. War Thunder’s community manager confirmed the document breached the forum’s rules and was removed immediately. The user received a temporary ban.

This is the latest in a growing list of similar incidents. Previous leaks involved documentation for the UK’s Challenger 2 main battle tank, France’s Leclerc, China’s ZTZ-99, the Eurocopter Tiger, and several U.S. aircraft including the F-16, F-15E, F-117, and most recently, the Eurofighter Typhoon. Each case followed a similar pattern: a user attempted to support a technical argument by uploading documents that were either classified or export restricted. Each time, moderators deleted the posts and sanctioned the accounts involved.

By 25 July, all sites and apps that allow pornography – whether they are dedicated adult sites or social media, search or gaming services – must use highly effective age checks to ensure children are not normally able to encounter it. Online firms who publish their own pornography are already required to protect children from it, and thousands of sites have already introduced robust age checks in response. 

Major porn providers operating in the UK have confirmed to Ofcom that they will introduce effective checks by next month’s deadline in order to comply with the new rules. They include PornHub, the most-visited pornographic service in the UK. Other services who are happy to be named at this stage include BoyfriendTV, Cam4, FrolicMe, inxxx, Jerkmate, LiveHDCams, MyDirtyHobby, RedTube, Streamate, Stripchat, Tube8, and YouPorn. This represents a broad range of pornography services accessed in the UK.

Monitoring compliance with these new duties is a priority for Ofcom. If any company fails to comply with its new duties, Ofcom can impose fines and – in very serious cases – apply for a court order to prevent the site or app from being available in the UK. As part of our work enforcing the Online Safety Act, we have already launched investigations into four porn providers and won’t hesitate to take further action from July.

In December 2023, the dating platform Bumble introduced so-called AI Icebreakers to the “Bumble for Friends” section of the app. Powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the feature is designed to help you start a conversation by providing an AI-generated message. In order to do this, your personal profile information is fed into the AI system without Bumble ever obtaining your consent. Although the company repeatedly shows you a banner designed to nudge you into clicking “Okay”, which suggests that it relies on user consent, it actually claims to have a so-called “legitimate interest” to use data. noyb has therefore filed a complaint with the Austrian data protection authority.

The old saying “timing is everything” apparently also applies to corruption.

On June 6, mere hours after Elon Musk started his tweet war with the president, Trump’s Commerce Department released its long-awaited revisions to the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (“BEAD”) program.

This $42 billion broadband-deployment plan was part of the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (“IIJA”) that Congress passed in November 2021. As expected, the Trump administration’s revisions radically overhauled what had been a rural broadband-deployment plan focused on building fiber networks — and turned it into a free money dispenser for Elon Musk’s satellite-broadband company, Starlink.

Had this billionaire bromance fallen apart a few weeks earlier, we might have seen a less sweeping revision of this once-in-a-lifetime infrastructure program. But now that this revised plan is out there, analysts everywhere — operating on the premise that Trump-administration corruption is a given — are trying to predict how and to what degree the Trump team will enforce these changes designed to unjustly enrich Musk … a man the president reportedly called “a big time drug addict” as the two traded barbs.

The revived No JS Club celebrates websites that don't use Javascript, the powerful but sometimes overused code that's been bloating the web and crashing tabs since 1995. The No CSS Club goes a step further and forbids even a scrap of styling beyond the browser defaults. And there is even the No HTML Club, where you're not even allowed to use HTML. Plain text websites!

The modern web is the pure incarnation of evil. When Satan has a 1v1 with his manager, he confers with the modern web. If Satan is Sauron, then the modern web is Melkor [1]. Every horror that you can imagine is because of the modern web. Modern web is not an existential risk (X-risk), but is an astronomic suffering risk (S-risk) [2]. It is the duty of each and every man, woman, and child to revolt against it. If you're not working on returning civilization to ooga-booga, you're a bad person.

A compromise with the clubs is called for. A hypertext brutalism that uses the raw materials of the web to functional, honest ends while allowing web technologies to support clarity, legibility and accessibility. Compare this notion to the web brutalism of recent times, which started off in similar vein but soon became a self-subverting aesthetic: sites using 2.4MB frameworks to add text-shadow: 40px 40px 0px hotpink to 400kb Helvetica webfonts that were already on your computer.

I also like the idea of implementing "hypotext" as an inversion of hypertext. This would somehow avoid the failure modes of extending the structure of text by failing in other ways that are more fun. But I'm in two minds about whether that would be just a toy (e.g. references banished to metadata, i.e. footnotes are the hypertext) or something more conceptual that uses references to collapse the structure of text rather than extend it (e.g. links are includes and going near them spaghettifies your brain). The term is already in use in a structuralist sense, which is to say there are 2 million words of French I have to read first if I want to get away with any of this.

Republished Under Creative Commons Terms. Boing Boing Original Article.

Research.

Analyses of over 40,000 documents, computer vision papers and downstream patents spanning four decades indicates the extent of this surveillance and the rise of obfuscating language that helps to normalise such approaches.

LOL

1. Robotaxi drives into oncoming lane
2. Rider presses "pull over", Robotaxi stops in the middle of an intersection, rider gets out while Robotaxi blocks intersection for a few moments
3. Rider presses pull over and the car just stopped in the middle of the road. Safety monitor has to call rider support to get car moving again
4. Robotaxi doesn't detect UPS driver's reverse lights (or the car reversing towards it) and continues to attempt to park, then safety monitor manually stops it
5. Robotaxi cuts off a car, then randomly brakes (potentially because of an upcoming tree shadow?)
6. Robotaxi going 26 in a 15
7. Robotaxi unexpectedly brakes, possibly due to nearby police
8. Robotaxi unexpectedly slams on brakes, causing rider to drop phone
9. Robotaxi comes to a complete stop after approaching an object, then runs it over (rider says it's a shopping bag, though the car visibly bump up and down)
10. Robotaxi runs over curb in parking lot
11. Safety driver moved to driver seat to intervene

Note: The link is Paywall free.

• TikTok content moderators in Turkey are speaking out about traumatic working conditions, including exposure to graphic content, long hours, and a lack of mental health support.
• Efforts to unionize have been followed by legal roadblocks and layoffs, despite initial government approval.
• Moderators in Kenya, India, Poland, and elsewhere are also trying to organize for better protections in an industry increasingly reliant on outsourced labor.

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​FAA cited for ineffective oversight of Boeing’s known recordkeeping issues

WASHINGTON (June 24, 2025) — The National Transportation Safety Board Tuesday said the probable cause of last year’s in-flight mid-exit door (MED) plug blowout on a Boeing 737 MAX 9 was Boeing’s failure to “provide adequate training, guidance and oversight” to its factory workers.

The NTSB also found the Federal Aviation Administration was ineffective in ensuring Boeing addressed “repetitive and systemic” nonconformance issues associated with its parts removal process.

The NTSB also concluded that in the two years before the accident, Boeing’s voluntary safety management system, or SMS, was inadequate, lacked formal FAA oversight, and did not proactively identify and mitigate risks. The investigation found that accurate and ongoing data about overall safety culture is necessary for an SMS to be successfully integrated into a quality management system.

On Jan. 5, 2024, the Boeing 737-9, operated as Alaska Airlines flight 1282, was climbing through 14,830 feet about six minutes after takeoff from Portland, Oregon, when the left MED plug departed the airplane. During the rapid depressurization, some passengers’ belongings were sucked out of the airplane, oxygen masks dropped from the overhead passenger service units, and the door to the flight deck swung open, injuring a flight attendant. In addition to the flight attendant, seven passengers received minor injuries. The two pilots, the other three flight attendants and the remaining 164 passengers were uninjured. The flight was destined for Ontario, California.

“The safety deficiencies that led to this accident should have been evident to Boeing and to the FAA — should have been preventable,” NTSB Chairwoman Jennifer Homendy said. “This time, it was missing bolts securing the MED plug. But the same safety deficiencies that led to this accident could just as easily have led to other manufacturing quality escapes and, perhaps, other accidents.”

The MED plug was found in a Portland neighborhood two days after the accident. When investigators examined the recovered plug, they found evidence that the four bolts needed to secure the plug were missing before the accident occurred. Without the bolts, NTSB investigators found the unsecured plug “had moved incrementally upward during previous flight cycles” until it departed the airplane during the accident flight.

The airplane had been delivered to Alaska Airlines three months earlier. Investigators determined that the door plug was opened without the required documentation in Boeing’s Renton, Washington, factory on Sept. 18, 2023, to perform rivet repair work on the fuselage. The door plug was closed the following day. While Boeing’s procedures called for specific technicians to open or close MED plugs, none of the specialized workers were working at the time the door plug was closed. The absence of proper documentation of the door plug work meant no quality assurance inspection of the plug closure occurred.

The investigation also highlighted the need for additional training on flight crew oxygen masks and their communication systems and the need for greater voluntary use of child restraint systems by caregivers of those under two years of age.

The NTSB issued new safety recommendations to the FAA and Boeing. Previously issued recommendations were reiterated to the FAA, Airlines for America, the National Air Carrier Association and Regional Airline Association.

The executive summary of the report, including the findings, probable cause and safety recommendations, is available online​. Additional material, including the preliminary report, previously issued safety recommendations, news releases, the public docket, investigative updates and links to photos and videos, is available on the accident investigation webpage.

The final report will be published in the coming weeks on NTSB.gov.

When discussing the intersection of data privacy and LGBTQ+ experiences, it's inevitable to also talk about queer dating apps. Due to a smaller percentage of the population and a number of factors complicating in-person dating, people part of the queer community are more likely to seek online platforms to meet lovers and friends. Unfortunately, using queer dating apps can be very dangerous for privacy, and even for safety.

Dating apps are generally horrible for everyone's privacy, but the queer population is at an even higher risk of harm due to discrimination, and even criminalization in certain regions.

Despite the risks, LGBTQ+ people still need to fulfill their social and romantic needs like anyone else.

This isn't an easy task outside the online realm either. Discrimination can be much worse in physical environments that aren't specifically catering to the queer community. In some regions, this can even mean a greater risk of physical aggression.

LGBTQ+ people aren't necessarily safe to date in the same ways cisgender heterosexual people are, increasing the need for safe spaces.

Another important factor is that a smaller percentage of the population necessarily creates a smaller dating pool. Even if someone were to avoid entirely online services, if they aren't located in a town large enough to host LGBTQ+ venues and events, or if they live in an environment where revealing their queer identity could be unsafe to them, online spaces might be their only viable option to find connections.

Sadly, this isn't ideal. In today's world, it seems very few services (if any) are considering the importance of data privacy for dating apps seriously enough.

For this reason, it is crucial to acknowledge the dangers, and learn about ways to minimize the risks, and to stay safe while looking for romantic or sexual partners online.